No Bad Things Happened Under Trump

One of the articles of faith among the Church of Trump is that no arguably bad thing that is happening now would happen if Trump was president. Of course this "what if" thinking can never be proven. The world is a complicated enough place that you can be sure that the same exact set of circumstances are rarely duplicated in different time periods. Presidents of both parties are famous for taking credit for all the positives that occur during their administration, but not the blame for the negatives. Certainly a president's policies, both foreign and domestic, will affect how the business community and foreign leaders conduct themselves. Room must be given, however, for the simple fact that leaders will make decisions that are best for them, notwithstanding a United States president's policies or rhetoric. Trump, the narcissist that he is, gave outsize credit to his own abilities to influence events, both nationally and internationally. As I have said before, he was fortunate to have inherited an economy that had been on the upswing, following the same trends as his predecessor, President Obama, had during his second term. He likes to emphasize that he started no new wars during his term, but falsely states that he is the only one in decades to have done this and also falsely states that he "had no wars" during that time. What are the facts?

If you go back to World War II Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama also started no new wars, although most of them, like Trump, had wars taking place during their time in office that they inherited from previous administrations. During Trump's time, while no new wars were begun, the war in Afghanistan was still going on. We had troops in Iraq and Syria fighting ISIS.  He had the heads of a branch of Iran's military assassinated. Trump claims that the world was at peace while he was president, specifically pointing to the Russian war in Ukraine and the Israeli war in Gaza as something that wouldn't happen if he were around. But is this evidence of Trump's preventative powers? While the main invasion of Ukraine did not take place until after Trump left office, Russia had been fighting to annex Ukraine's eastern provinces for several years. Are we really supposed to believe that Putin would delay his own revanchist plans in order to please his pal Donnie? Or that Putin was afraid of what Trump's reaction might be? A response "like the world has never seen" might make for a popular tweet, but was there any substance? Doubtful. His "fire and fury" tweets directed at the dictator he first mocked as "little rocket man" and later exchanged love letters with, didn't appear to have much affect, since the rockets continued as did the nuclear tests. 

The expanding conflict in the Middle East is also supposed to be happening now because Biden is allegedly "weak" while Trump's "strength" would have meant that Hamas would never have initiated the October 7th attacks. Thinking this way ignores the deliberate moves by Netanyahu and his allies to make a Palestinian state impossible, including propping up Hamas itself; the deliberate moves by Hamas to use their own civilians as pawns in their ideology; the constant chipping away at Palestinian land in the West bank by Jewish settlers; the provocation by Hamas of recurring rocket attacks and the decades-long buildup of hatred between elements of both Israel and the Palestinians who each have their no-overlap view of the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan and the creation of Israel. These moves aren't happening because they give a shit who the U.S. president is. They're all fanatical idealogues and make their decisions based on what works for them. You can be sure that not only is the United States not part of Hamas' calculations, but would likely see direct American involvement as confirmation of their them-against-the-infidels mindset. 

Things happen in the world that don't revolve around who is sitting in the Oval Office.

But since these things are happening, not in a campaign speech imaginary world, but here and now, I'm satisfied that the person who is sitting in the Oval Office is able to handle them.